-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- It 's been 30,000 years since Neanderthals walked the earth , but now we can hear what they sounded like , according to a Florida anthropologist .

Neanderthal man apparently sounded like a frog croaking or a human burping when talking .

Robert McCarthy of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton reconstructed Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate their voice with a computer synthesizer .

The result is a single syllable that sounds strange and unremarkable : part croaking frog , part burping human . But McCarthy says that 's because Neanderthals lacked the `` quantal vowels '' modern humans use .

`` They would have spoken a bit differently , '' McCarthy said at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Ohio this month . `` They would n't have been able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken language . ''

New Scientist magazine discussed McCarthy 's findings and linked to his vocal simulation on its Web site . Listen to Neanderthal man speak

McCarthy used 50,000-year-old fossils from France to make his reconstruction , New Scientist said . He plans to simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence , the magazine reported .

To reconstruct the vocal tracts , McCarthy teamed with linguist Phil Lieberman , who worked in the 1970s to deduce the dimensions of a Neanderthal larynx based on its skull . E-mail to a friend

@highlight

Anthropologist reconstructs Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate their voice

@highlight

Result sounds like a part croaking frog or a human burping

@highlight

Plan is to eventually simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence